My favourite way to cook lamb chops on a weeknight.
The one of the only ways* you'll want to prepare lamb chops for dinner from now on.
This month on ingredient we’re focusing on yogurt: the creamy, tangy kitchen workhorse that does so much more than just provide you with an easy breakfast, snack or dip.
You can already find the recipe for my Cumin Roast Tomatoes with Lemon Yogurt here, and my messy, saucy and totally delicious recipe for Portobello Mushroom Shawarma Wraps with Spiced Yogurt Sauce here. Do upgrade your subscription to unlock every recipe in the ingredient archive, and of course to help funding the free part of what I post here! No creative likes asking for money, but without it ingredient can’t function.
Summer dinners are among some of my favourite dinners, and I’m really sad they’re coming to an end. And by summer dinners I don’t just mean dinners served during the summer: I mean dinnertimes when there is so much produce around that I just grab some sort of steak or chops from the freezer (both lamb and pork chops, and pork steaks have become a real weeknight go-to for me the last few years) and then just raid the fridge for whatever I can put together to match them, usually alongside some ciabatta also from the freezer and a big green salad.
I love to cook, I love to follow recipes, but these ‘summer dinners’ are among the few occasions - alongside our Sunday roast - where I just cook without following someone else’s instructions or writing things down as I go so I can later write my own.
There are some combinations I find myself setting the ingredients out for again and again, and surprisingly for this usually last-minute formula my favourite dinner combination both last summer and this just past involves a bit of planning ahead, but with the caveat that there are two things on the plate that can happily be done a day or two ahead whenever I get a moment, or which can be forgotten about then left for the next day when plans change at the last minute or when we’ve become so tired we’ve decided to retire to the pub garden for dinner instead.
The bread is optional here, because we’ve got a pot of the seasonal dish I look forward to most each summer on the table: slow cooked borlotti beans, seasoned with sage and tomatoes from the garden (twice this year the beans were also ones I’d grown myself), and made whilst I’m pottering around other projects in the kitchen and either put on the back of the hob to be reheated later, or stashed in the fridge for another day. I do check I’ve remembered it right at the start of every borlotti season, but this is one of the few recipes in my kitchen I have committed to memory.
Then on the table we’ve also got the aforementioned green salad: always the soft leaves, often from the garden, and always, always dressed with a simple mix of extra virgin olive oil and white balsamic vinegar whisked together with a pinch of salt.
But the star of the show - alongside the beans of course - is so much better if I have had the forethought to get it started up to 2 days before (though if I only remember with a couple of hours to go, that will be okay!) are lamb loin chops, simply marinated with yogurt, oil, salt and a few aromatics, usually in a plastic bag so I can easily massage the meat; you don’t need to get hands or tongs messy to turn them this way, and the bag also saves space because my fridge is often full to bursting and space is at a premium!
A paired piece of lemon peel is sometimes nice to add if whatever you’re planning on serving the lamb with leans more on the Mediterranean or Middle Eastern side.
Then, I pan fry them. The magic ingredient, the essential key here to levelling up an already excellent couple of pieces of meat is to use enough yogurt in the marinade to tenderise the chops (I know they’re not the cheapest cut so you’ll want to treat them with respect) but not enough to burn so you’ll be able to fry them off right in the pan until their tails are juicy and crisp, but their middles are still tender, ready to be served with their resting juices.
If you, unlike me, have mastered the art of lighting a barbecue on which to grill (I can cook on one perfectly, it is the making the fire well enough to cook on with some element of control part I’ve still yet to master…) they’ll taste even better on there. Blister some baby peppers and fat spring onions whole to serve alongside while you’re at it.
Dinner is served.
*As I mentioned in my introduction to yogurt, has a far superior lamb chop recipe in her book The Joyful Home Cook but it involves having whey to hand, which I only have when I’ve strained yogurt - a task I perform a lot less often than I marinate and grill chops, hence this recipe!
Yogurt Marinated Lamb Chops
Serves: 2, Preparation time: 5 minutes, Marination time: between 3 hours and 3 days, Cooking time: 10 minutes, Resting time: 5 minutes